Not OP, but I work on alarm systems and getting proper coverage is a big part of installation. Passive InfraRed (PIR) sensors are based on emitted or reflected infrared energy as you suggested. This means they can be defeated by an object which is not very reflective and is at room temperature, but our Roomba here probably is warmer than the room since it has a running motor and discharging battery. PIRs have a limited field of view, which is often adjustable. Think of it like a camera, you can point it at the wall instead of at the floor and you'll see people but not small pets.

Personally, I blame the Jetsons. For years they showed us how much fun it would be to zip around in flying cars, get dressed on a conveyer belt and have Rosie the Robot swiftly clean the house and care for the kids at the same time. It's more than likely that the first time you fell in love with -- or learned to fear -- artificial intelligence, was via pop culture, whether that be in movies, TV or comics. And depending on your age, you were probably afraid of HAL, Megatron or the dreaded Stepford Wives, and yet enthralled by Hymie, R2-D2, KITT, Bender or Data -- perhaps all of them. The point is, for many people in 2017, artificial intelligence still means T-X or WALL-E, and as ROSS's own Andrew Arruda can attest, "when I walk into a room of professionals to present our AI technology, people look behind me to see if a robot is walking in as well."

With the clock ticking down on the biggest film of his career, "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," director Gareth Edwards wrestled with the high stakes ace up his sleeve: using computer graphics to digitally insert actor Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, into Edwards' new "Star Wars" film as the iconic villain Grand Moff Tarkin. "We were ultra-paranoid about it," Edwards told The Times ahead of the home video release of "Rogue One," which crossed the billion-dollar global box office mark just 39 days into its December release. "Even a month away, there was this feeling of, 'Is this going to work? Plenty of pressure already hung over "Rogue One," the first standalone side story in the "Star Wars" franchise. Anchored by a new heroine named Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), recruited into leading a team of characters on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the prequel to 1977's "Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope" would tell a darker, more violent tale than its predecessors in a galaxy far, far, away. "In the early conversations about the end of the movie, we knew we were going to hand it off in some form, like passing the gauntlet to Princess Leia," Edwards said of the film's final sequence, in which the Death Star plans land in Leia's hands, leading into the events of "A New Hope." In Austin, Texas, to speak at the South by Southwest festival last month, Edwards recounted the challenge. The task of creating a young CG Leia by digitally blending Carrie Fisher's face, and a single word of dialogue she delivered in 1977 -- "hope" -- with the motion-capture performance of actress Ingvild Deila, went to Industrial Light & Magic. Fisher, who died Dec. 27, did not film scenes for "Rogue One." "We knew we were probably not going to be able to get away without showing her without it feeling like a cheat," Edwards said. "You could do some gag where you just saw the back of her.

"Jarvis, remind me to develop a personality for you later." Jarvis is the quintessential artificial intelligence of film ("Iron Man", "The Avengers"), and now Mark Zuckerberg has used his Stark-like fortunes to build his own. So is film invading your smart home or is it vice versa? Voice assistants, learning thermostats, smart security, connected light bulbs -- it sounds like a dream, but judging by the clever ideas dominating CES, our film fantasies could soon enter the mainstream. We've moved beyond the tacky smart home horror films of the past (a smart home impregnates a woman in "Demon Seed", and of course it's from the '70s).

Twitter shareholders will vote on whether to turn the social network into a user-led co-operative at the company's shareholder meeting set to take place at the end of May. The move follows a petition by a group of Twitter fans urging the company to sell itself to its users, turning the firm's publicly-listed share structure into a co-operative, meaning it would be owned by its users. "Wall Street thinks the company is a failure because it's not raking in enough profit for shareholders. That means that Twitter is up for sale, and there is a real risk that the new owner may ruin our beloved platform with a narrow pursuit of profit or political gains," the petition, which has so far gathered nearly 3,500 signatures, reads. "We want the company to share its future with those whose participation make it so valuable: its users" it adds.

Adam Marcus will host a session, Human-assisted AI at B12: 10 lessons in giving humans superpowers, at the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference, June 26-29, 2017, in New York City. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the O'Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Adam Marcus, co-founder and CTO of B12, a startup focused on building human-in-the-loop intelligent applications. We talked about the open source platform Orchestra,for coordinating human-in-the-loop projects; the current wave of human-assisted AI applications; best practices for reviewing and scoring experts; and flash teams.

A technology company wanted its ads in front of people reading online about data storage. Instead, tens of thousands of dollars worth of ads landed on websites that belonged in the Internet's trash can. There was clouddatarecoverywebhost.info, where the firm's ad appeared on a page that featured a viral YouTube video of a woman whacking an attacker to the ground with a dog. Aside from their URLs, the websites had nothing to do with online storage. In the tangled ecosystem that is online advertising, such nefarious websites collectively reap billions of dollars annually bilking advertisers.

Google is set to give its artificial intelligence-based voice assistant, Google Assistant, a more robust personality. The company has hired Emma Coats, a storyboard artist who worked on Pixar's movie Brave, to help create a more "chatty" Assistant, BBC reported Friday. "The Assistant gives a conversational way to access everything Google can do for you, and on the Personality Team we add delight wherever we can. The rest of Google has all the useful parts of the Assistant covered, so the Google Assistant Personality Team really supports them by coming up with fun things the Assistant can say and do, whether that's games or things to discover," Coats told BBC in an interview. The Google Assistant is part of a tussle between Google and rival Apple, with both companies trying to outdo each other in terms of voice-based features every year.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a hot topic, with development being made very quickly in the industry it's no wonder everyone is talking about it. We are always reading about the future of AI and whether robots will start to think and really become intelligent. While this does seem far off AI, with the help of machine learning, is starting to have an impact on our lives. All of our smartphones today have some form of'virtual personal assistant', for example Siri or Google Voice, allowing the user to ask questions to their phone and gain a response. While these apps are using machine learning to be able to answer and aid your question they are also learning about you.

Amazon has announced a crackdown on media players that enable consumers to illegally access pirated content. The firm has warned sellers that their accounts face termination if they're found to be selling "certain" prohibited streaming media players. "Products offered for sale on Amazon should not promote, suggest the facilitation of, or actively enable the infringement of or unauthorized access to digital media or other protected content," reads the company's warning. "Any streaming media player or other device that violates this policy is prohibited from sale on Amazon." The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.